Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Good on you
That was Ronald Reagan's response to Israel's wiping out Iraq's nuclear bomb facility back in 1981 . I gather that our current president feels the same way about yesterday's attack on Syria's airbase.
What a relief to have an adult back in the White House.
Over at The Atlantic ( appropriately enough) a writer named William Langewiescher has penned a dry, awful account of the sinking of the U.S. Cargo ship El Fargo. All hands lost. Good, awful, tragic read.
Anyone who's been through one of these ocean adventures knows that it's pretty much a matter of the dice rolling, one way, or the other. I've done it twice, and I while I haven't quit sailing, I'd just as soon not toss those dice a third time. Of course, on most voyages, you don't know that the odds are waiting for you when you walk so jauntily down the pier in your Bermuda shorts and Top Siders. Ain't life a kick in the ass?
Bill Effros collects evidence for his next law suit
(Sorry, Bill. I thought it was funny).
Aw, hell
From Pal Nancy, this report:
No one knows why the goats climbed up on the pedestal of a Mahoning River bridge and set out along a narrow beam.
They're not talking. But goats do love to climb and explore, notes goat specialist Susan Schoenian of the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. So these two goats, who are probably pals (because goats are social animals), escaped from the nearby yard where they lived and went on an adventure.
They deftly walked along the beam with their very small feet. They proceeded about 200 feet. But it turns out they couldn't just keep on walking ahead — there was an obstacle that kept them from moving forward. So they had to turn around and head back the way they came.
The brown goat managed the trick. "He walked out to a concrete pier and somehow got himself turned around," says Todd Tilson, operations manager in the maintenance department of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The white goat did not manage to turn around.
That's why, in the photo, you'll see the two goats facing each other.
Tilson reports that the brown goat "kept hitting the white one with its head" to make it walk backward. "It would take one step, two steps back, then stop," he says.
And really, can you blame it? Would you want to walk backward on a beam that is about 8 inches wide and 100 feet above the ground? Yeah, me neither.]
The goats weren't likely to leap off, conjectures Schoenian: "They're not going to jump. That's not part of their behavior to jump off of something. Their desire is to climb."
In their predicament, she sees similarities to human behavior: "Think of a child who climbs out there to explore and gets stuck and is too scared to go any further. And you just kind of shut down even if you could keep going."
The call about the stranded goats came into the Pennsylvania Turnpike at roughly 10 a.m. Tuesday. The son of the owner of the goats said they had been out there 18 hours already.
Clearly, a crane was needed. But the turnpike crane was in use, so the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation stepped in. Steve McCarthy, a civil engineer for bridge inspection with the department, was drafted for the rescue effort. "It was my first goat extraction," he says.
He and a colleague got in the bucket at the end of the long arm of the crane.
Pennsylvania Turnpike spokeswoman Rosanne Placey called the operation "Goat Watch" and remembers "dozens upon dozens" of status reports from turnpike maintenance folks coming in on her phone.
A happy ending wasn't guaranteed. "If they fall off the beam while we're trying to rescue them, it would feel like we did harm to them," Tilson says.
"The initial plan was to try and separate the goats so we could could grab the goat facing the wrong way and turn it around," McCarthy says. But the white goat wasn't cooperating.
"I said, 'I'm going for it,' " he recalls. "I grabbed the goat as tight as I could." And he lifted it into the bucket.
The white goat was deposited on the bridge and handed over to its owner's son. McCarthy then tapped the beam with a pole to encourage the brown goat to make its way back.
Asked about the possible cost of the rescue, Tilson says, "We didn't even calculate it. We were just trying to be a good neighbor and get the goats back safely."
I'm generally against excessive government spending but in this case, I'd say the money was well spent.
(There's a family story involving two very, very young daughters' — 5 and 3? — similarly-stupid adventure that inspired Nancy to send along this story, but to protect the guilty, I'll leave that alone.)
vapors
The woman, a 23-year-old identified as Jane Doe in Manhattan Supreme Court papers, says she made it through undergraduate studies at the Greenwich Village university with a 3.7 grade-point average while battling cancer — but now claims in a suit against the school that she can’t focus on her studies because of trauma stemming from her encounters with professor Emanuele Castano.
The 43-year-old Italian native was the recipient of the prestigious National Education Association grant in 2016 when he started “grooming [Doe] for a sexual relationship,” the suit says.
Doe claims the divorced dad plied her with booze and pot after inviting her to dinner with him and his son at his home on March 3, 2017.
The student claims the professor “advanced himself on me, but didn’t stop to ask me whether I was OK with this,” after the boy had gone to sleep.
She continued sleeping with Castano, but felt that he exploited her as she was still recovering from lymphoma, the suit claims.
Their relationship deteriorated after Doe discovered Castano was sleeping with a post-doctoral student, according to court papers.
Last July, Doe complained to school administrators, saying in a statement, “I had sexual intercourse, unwillingly, with my boss/professor/advisor over 10 times.”
She says school officials took months to investigate, even though there’d been a previous sexual misconduct complaint about Castano in 2012 and a letter stating that a student had asked to be transferred after Castano had group sex with her classmates.
I'm the father of two daughters, and would certainly be tempted to "interview" this professor in my role as Pappa Bear, but I also am still able to recall who I was at 23, what I was capable of, and saying "bugger off" was one of those capabilities. Harvey Weinstein is an awful, awful human being and a creep, but a young starlet who sleeps with him is a prostitute, selling her body in exchange for a film role. And a 23-year-old graduate student peddling her ass for a good grade is just as sorry an example of adulthood as her Hollywood peers.
If we're really determined to reverse 100 years of history and return women to sheltered, protective homes where they'll be guarded by fathers and husbands, fine: let's announce that and be done with it. I myself prefer strong, independent women who can think and fend for themselves in all areas of life, including sexual relationships (and decide how to vote for themselves, Hillary).
At 23, George Armstrong Custer was a Brigadier General (we'll ignore his impetuous behavior twelve years later, in 1876); today, at 23, men and women with the rank of Second and First Lieutenant are expected to lead their troops into combat. In the age of the nanny state, we're all considered infants, but surely there should be some age of maturity, somewhere: I think 21 is a good place to start.
27 Clapboard Ridge Road, an 1848 charmer on 4.3 acres (R-2 zone), has been for sale since April, 2017 at $5.495. Today it dropped to $4.995. In 2003, it started at $6.295 million, and sold in 2004 for $5.350. The current owners put some real money into the house after their purchase, but will they too end up at a million below that first asking price?
Stay tuned.
16 Rock Ridge Avenue
16 Rock Ridge Avenue, 1928 construction, 3.4 acres, asking $11.9 million (I told you I wasn't going to necessarily endorse its price). From time to time over the past couple of decades, I've had clients who've come to Greenwich from disparate parts of the world, and when I've brought them to houses like this, they almost invariably say something like, "now this is what I envisioned in a Greenwich house!"
And it really does hit almost all the buttons (except for its one-car garage, but there's certainly land enough here to correct that): an 8,300 square foot main house, a 2,400 sq.ft. guest house, and isn't it amusing to reflect that 2,400 sq. ft. is larger than the average house in real America, set on beautiful grounds, in a private association.
I love this house, and while I'd rather sell it to a client than just admire it here, I do hope it will go to someone who will treasure a house of this era.
It's probably unfair to say this, but I once house sat for friends while they were in Europe for six months, and they had this same sort of pot collection. Every time I went to use one over that period I discovered that I had to wipe the dust off it first. Later, when I got into real estate and began touring large homes, I noticed that my friends weren't alone in their lack of any real interest in actually, you know, cooking.
Not at all a comment on these particular owners, just a general observation.
(UPDATE: I haven't seen this house yet, but the absence of pictures of its bathrooms and master bedroom make me suspect that there's work to be done there. Not a deal killer, certainly, but something to be considered when negotiating its price.)
"Club Lane"
"5 Club Lane" — the would be Miitiades, to you and me, reports a price cut today, from $3.795 to $3.495.
New construction, butt ugly.
The interior is what it is, but the exterior is an example of what awaits us all: flat roof, to max out the FAR permitted here, and dirt piled up for the house to meet the new FEMA standards. The house towers above its neighbors, and the FAR architecture has produced an ugly square chunk of a building.
And that's a shame..
A slow hand will get you nowhere
I've received a number of emails about this, and now Greenwich Time reports on the same thing: tickets to the annual (thank you, Ray Dalio) Town Party went on sale online at 10:00 AM, and were sold out by 10:01. With Eric Clapton as the headliner, it's not surprising that there was a huge demand, but a sell out within 60 seconds, when sales are supposedly restricted to Greenwich residents and people who work in town suggests, to me, that the scalpers' computers were at work here.
This is in no way meant to criticize the organizers of the event, who have been bringing a great event to Greenwich since Mr. Dalio first came up with the idea, and funded it, but if the scalpers have moved in, perhaps some changes in ticket sales should be made. Take sales off line, maybe, and require buyers to appear in person, with a limit, say, of ten tickets?
I'll point out that sponsor tickets are still available for $1,500, which would be a nice way to support this festival. Out of my reach, unfortunately, but surely not for everyone.
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